30 comments:

I regret not being able to credit the photographer who took the top three colour shots.

I suspect it's Jack Delano, but as I can't confirm that, and as I discovered the photos hidden away in an obscure digital nook, and as the archive isn't offering any clues... I must limit myself to saying: Merry Christmas, everybody!

just yesterday I was telling my son about gettingthe BEST bowl of stew ever chicken livers,hearts,gizzards, rice, onions, green peppers... in a thick gravy in a big bowl for like 40 cents with bread AT the Greyhound Station well THAT'S THE STATION !

they had this little lunchen-ette just beyond the magazine stand...

across the street was the Trailways Bus-Station... they had better apple pie a la mode

I hope everyone will wish to take a peek at Julia's wonderful Christmas post.

Ed, there you go again, whetting my appetite for the past. The farther we get from it, the better it seems to look, and smell, and taste.

Why does it take the cruel vanishings of time to make us appreciate the goodness of the good things -- or is it just that we find it so much simpler to invest them with that goodness the farther away they become, growing ever smaller, like the earth seen from a spaceship that is rapidly departing, never to return?

(While building this post, I was surprised to find many ancient buried Christmas memories, of lost places and times and people, all now gone forever -- memories purged of all the tiresome drudgery and difficulty of reality, naturally, but with the moments of childhood excitement and mystery more or less intact -- nudging back up toward the extremely unmagical "surface" of the present. Quite strange, these "true fictions" we insistently construct in our minds, all the more palpable, it sometimes seems, the older we get. But then again one should really speak not for some projected universal "us" but merely for oneself, and in so doing so admit frankly to oneself that it's very likely a dearth of comparably enchanting present-tense experience that casts this aura of enchantment upon the deep past. Without the little white lies one tells oneself about the past, what past would there be? It's the investigation or exploration of those ruins -- or runes? -- that probably compels researches like these, it must in the end be admitted.)

Thanks for the pictures. Somehow, looking at pictures of strangers sharing a common experience, from the unemployed outside a ramshackle shack to the mother and daughter wrapping gifts, touches one deeply.

One of my fondest memories of my mother was her teaching me how to wrap a gift.

So, Tom, thanks for this gift, giving us back what we all share, the collective memory of our own secret lives.

Yes, Don -- and in the moment of experiencing, across whatever gulf of distance, that curious shared collective feeling, perhaps, for at least a moment, we do become less strange to one another. In a world like the one we inhabit now, anything that does that is surely to be treasured.

The warmest of wishes from here to you and yours, for the season.

(And may I add that though we've never met, from the first, here, you've "never been a stranger"... in fact, at some point your useful, direct and deep insights became something to be relied on, in that sense I once mentioned, that after writing something new, I got into the habit of saying to myself, "what would Don think?")

Great pictures, Tom. Although I've always been a bit suspicious of the 'truth' of photographs, I nonetheless love looking at old photos and have countless volumes of them.

Funny thing is, it's always the small details that get me: what happened to that kid glimpsed in the background? That guy with the hat and package--where's he going? Did he get there? That little girl, peering shyly from behind someone--did she have a good life? Where's that bus going? Does that bartender own the joint or is he an employee?

I guess I'm a trivial sort of guy.

Anyway, warmest regards and wishes to you and Angelica for the new year.

Lovely of you to come round, Mish. Angelica and I send along our warmest best wishes to you and Inez for the new year.

The old remembering-machine is not what it used to be (and not much improved by falling down in a parking lot and breaking a couple of ribs a week ago, I think they may have been my memory ribs), but yes, it's always stirred back into some form of operation by old photos.

I think we've talked about this before, our mutual obsession in this area.

There is at least the excuse of old age, in my case, making these melancholy dwellings upon what was and what might have been into something more like a routine symptom of encroaching mind-loss than a true obsession.

You, happily, have no such excuse.

You may not have noticed my exhaustive (and probably, for some, exhausting) presentations of old photos, here, pretty much all through this past year.

The one moment in which the "what happened to him/her later" phenomenon really grabbed me by the throat came last summer, when, after posting some photos that included a shot of a Chicago cop on a horse, I looked closer and longer at that photo, until it dawned on me that the cop in the photo was indeed my grandfather.

The remembering machine spun out of control just a bit, in that moment.

One morning, at the home of that horseback policeman I have just mentioned, unable to bear the wait before the anticipated revelation of the imagined bounties beneath the tree, I snuck down early, opened several packages, among which was a small bottle of red nail polish (certainly not meant for me!), with which, in my excitement, I proceeded to paint all the other packages and their contents a very bright red.

there is/are two memories...(there is always &simultaneously The Dichotomyof

psychological memory (which is a no or not memory)& factual memory which is very accurate

psychological memory is a disturbance... it prevents you from accurate factual memory...

which leads me to dreams... which have been given a bad rap since Freud screwed with them hell, he ONLY analyzed the dreams of the Screwed up Crazies... he should have analyzed the dreams of some ... sane people artists, poets, etcs.

now

now I am absolutely & maybe even conditionally ......here/now pinch me when it sover or better still

now I am absolutely & maybe even conditionally......here/nowpinch me when it soveror better still

send me a Shiny Stone to roll between my fingers

__

I can corroborate your here & nowness, my friend.

Speaking of that Shiny Stone...

Last night a friendly Mexican food service employee handed me a small gift, something shiny and metallic. I thought it was a bullet, and, I believe, so did he. But the casing was hollow. I believe it was actually the tip of some sort of antenna.

Merry Christmas! And thanks for all these, including that glimpse of "TREES / TREES / TREES" in a window. The Monterrey pine branch is downstairs, waiting for lights to be lit; the boy's first tooth (under his pillow last night) has been changed into two dollars. Julia's Feliz Navidad brings reminds us of what it's all about --

Ed, yes, that hitting one over the fence (on the radio in the poem) by HK came after he'd gone up to the land of many lakes. That was I believe 1973, or so.

Re. your reference to the Senators: "my" Senators (first year I cognized em) were those of '51. As I look back, in the light of memory they seem a cast of immortals. In reality they went 62-92 under Bucky Harris and finished seventh, ahead of the Browns of course but, embarrassingly, behind the A's (of Philadelphia, still, then). I remember their countenances all. Mickey Vernon Cass Michaels Pete Runnels, Eddie "The Walking man" Yost, Sad Sam Mele, speedy Erv Noren, promising Gil Coan; Sam Dente, Gene (The Talker) Verble and Clyde Kluttz (!) on the pines; and on the mound, the nifty Cuban twirlers Connie Marrero and Sandalio (Sandy) Consuegra. I had their baseball cards on which their immortal countenances were portrayed. In my memory they are gods, though in fact they were bums, pretty much.

Yes, I'm a radio guy too, Ed. Since the big brothering of tv that resulted in nobody getting signals without cable, We Who Are without Cable (morituri) never watch tv. The only channel that's gettable is a Spanish language superstation and so that is my tv station. I have a wee radio which I plug into my head if ever I am out hobbling about. But I do look at plenty of images, in this box.

I've seen some of the trunkfuls of old family photos to which Mishari refers. He has posted his ruminations upon those photos. Around the same time, I was coincidentally posting some poems about old family photos. Of course Mishari's photos came from Kuwait, whereas mine came from the snow covered front precincts of the home of my grandfather.

Julia, that grandfather was a huge and powerful yet also sweet and gentle man (he derived from County Kerry, in the West of Ireland), so that, when he came downstairs at dawn on Christmas and found that most of the various gifts for everyone in the family had been opened and painted red, it was a curious moment. There I was. Obviously there were no "other suspects". He was quite kind about it, considering.

I was about five years old, I suppose.

It must be that he and my grandmother and aunt and mother, who were also present, had already concurred that there was never to be any hope for this nail-polish artist.

As one of the polled majority of Americans who has had a hard time getting into the Christmas spirit this year, I find the photographs posted (the "Penna rye whiskey" bar on Market Street, Philadelphia, holds special interest) and all of the really delightful cheer and fellowship expressed here (including Ed's stew, Julia's post, Stephen's post and all the rest) incredibly uplifting. Merry Christmas to all of you from Curtis, Caroline, Jane, 10 cats, 2 dogs, 2 birds and 2 fish.

Special thanks due you as we near the end of the year, and the end of your magnum opus, for the serenity and stability you have brought us by keeping us up with Temporality.

Every morning of the year we've counted on it (and you) to

mark a sense of light

above and beyond our variously endarkened world(s).

Llkewise we remain indebted to Johnny, whose love of the living universe is never far from our minds in composing a post such as this one (which is dedicated to the younger generation, Jane and Johnny).

Nonetheless it's worth hauling the broken bones out of bed and dragging them to the technology when that isthe House of Your Friend.

We here, furred and/or not, all send to you, C, J and your entire congregation of fauna our warmest of holiday wishes. (And as you'll have noted from the above, there's a gallery of Christmas creatures here for Jane and Johnny.)

Your comment explains in a few words, better than this blogger could do, the motivation for posting FSA photos. The truth of your message gets truer every day, though at the same time, alas, it seems the common people grow to have less and less in common, these days, beyond a common misfortune.

Many thanks for last string of comments (my has THIS reached us, aka "readers") and yes, my mornings have all been 'made' (lo these many days) by marking your dispatches from the front over there (where the rain has probably begun also to fall, as it is now here, an exciting new patch of weather coming through). . . .